Travel Day In Montana - (Clinton, MT)

Hope everyone had a wonderful Labor Day weekend.  :)

We have about 10 days to get to Harrisburg, Oregon to give us a little bit of time to check things out and take care of final details before the Fall Rally begins on Sept. 18.

So we started the questions of how are we getting there, where are we staying along the way, and for how long at each place.  All we know is we hate making reservations, we need someplace that can accommodate our rig, we would like to have electric hook-ups (more important when we need to get a lot of work done), we don't want to pay $40 per night, and our standards of places to park might be slightly lower than usual.

We decided our second stop would be in Coeur D'Alene, Idaho, so we wanted the first stop to be somewhere a little over half way there.  I used ReserveAmerica.com's campground search feature to find all campgrounds in their system in the Butte, Helena, & Missoula areas. 

ReserveAmerica handles federal campgrounds, several state park systems (including Montana), KOAs, and Encore/ELS properties.  If you want to just look at federal campgrounds, you can go to Recreation.gov which uses the ReserveAmerica interface, but is just for federal recreation sites.  State park systems that use ReserveAmerica are the same way - you can go to the individual state park websites, but the interface is ReserveAmerica's.

Their search feature allows you to search by map or by nearest city or zip code.  You can narrow the search by including the site length you need or by the hook-ups you want.

Of course we looked at Passport America for private RV parks offering the Passport America discount.  But as big as Montana is, there are only eight Passport America campgrounds in the state and none of them were in the area we needed.

And we looked at various other sources, including RVParkReviews.com, for information on private RV parks and campgrounds.  One of the things we like about RVParkReviews.com is they have a "Nearby" feature.  So, for example, we could look up campgrounds in Butte, MT and if we didn't see anything we liked, the "Nearby" window on the page shows nearby towns with campground reviews and it also shows the distance and the direction from the originally searched town.  A quick click on the links takes us to other options in the area.

Ultimately, we settled on Beavertail Hill State Park between Butte and Missoula, Montana.  It was over half way to Coeur D'Alene, convenient to I-90, had three large first come, first sites, and had 50-amp electric for $28 (non-resident fee; $20 for Montana residents).  Actually, all Montana state park campsites are first come, first served after Labor Day.

Just in case we couldn't get in for whatever reason, we had two private RV parks at nearby exits as back-ups.

Our goal was to leave Mammoth Campground in Yellowstone at 8:00 a.m. - pretty ambitious for us.  But we still made it out by 8:30.  Since there were no utilities to disconnect and no dump station, my part was easy.  :)

The five mile downhill, twisty stretch into Gardiner, MT isn't fun with a big rig, but we went very slowly and traffic was light.  Whew.  Glad that was out of the way.

Passing through the entrance station, they want you to go straight and go through the Roosevelt Arch.  But going through there is narrow and you have to make a hard right hand turn to get you going back into town.  However, immediately on the right after going through the entrance station is a road that goes directly into Gardiner.  They have a sign that says "Deliveries and Employees Only" but, over the last few days, we noticed most of the RVs taking that little shortcut and did the same. 

On the outskirts of Gardiner is Yellowstone RV Park, and that's where we went to dump tanks.  The little office is at the top of a hill, but you go down a gravel road to the park that sits on the Yellowstone River.  They don't have a dump station, but for $6 you can go into any empty pull-through site and dump tanks.  The gravel road in and out has a few speed bumps and it looks steep, but it isn't as bad as it looks. 

From Gardiner, the drive to Livingston is pretty and easy although I'm sure most folks weren't happy with us going 55 - 60 mph on their 70 mph speed limit road.

On I-90, there was very little traffic and it was an easy drive, except for one testy uphill climb and a couple of short 6% downgrades.

We arrived at Beavertail Hill State Park after our 260-mile drive.  It's only a quarter mile off the interstate and access is easy.  In the field on the right, before we got to the park, we noticed a bunch of RVs, tents, and equipment.  At first I thought it might have been some type of Labor Day weekend music festival, but then it was apparent it was a base for firefighters battling area wildfires.  There were over 200 firefighters there.

Beavertail Hill State Park is a small park with twenty-something sites.  There is a nature trail and it sits next to a mountain stream, but there isn't much else there.  The park personnel were extremely friendly.

The campsites are nice although it's a bit tight driving through with a big rig.  In fact, to get to the 75-foot pull-through we selected, we got permission to avoid the tightest loop and went in the wrong way to the section with much more room and a large turnaround.

We pulled into site 24 and got set up.

 

 

They have 50-amp electric at the site, but no water and no sewer (and no dump station).  You can take on water, but it didn't look like the most convenient process.  Fortunately, we had enough water left in our tank for a day or two.  They have both pit toilets and flush toilets, but no showers. 

We planned on staying two nights, but the wildfire smoke was terrible and got worse as the evening progressed.  The nearest fire was only about 30 miles away.  So, we decided to just stay the night and move on in the morning.

For the Montana resident rate ($20), Beavertail Hill is a nice little place to camp.  At the non-resident rate ($28) it's a bit pricey with no water at the sites, no dump station at all, traffic noise from the interstate (although still not as bad as the road noise at Mammoth Campground), and the occasional train whose sound is amplified in the river valley.  But the choking smoke was the main reason we needed to get the heck out of there.

In the spot we chose, our satellite had a southern sky view so we had internet and TV for the evening.  And we had good cell service as well.  But we couldn't keep our door or windows open due to the smoke.

Most of the night, we worked on figuring out our next stop but, by bedtime, we still hadn't made a decision.  Guess we'll figure it out in the morning.  :)

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Comments

[Sherry]

you probably already know about this site for fire info:
http://activefiremaps.fs.fed.us/

See u soon, weneed to get registered for weighing day before.

[Cindy B]

the yellowstone rv camp is the one where i was parked last summer while working in mammoth. love that you visited it, makes me feel connected somehow. safe travels and have a wonderful rally!
cindy